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Friday 18 July 2008

Based on a false premise

The Muslims’ letter to the Pope is not all it seems

The Muslims’ letter to the Pope is not all it seems

A closer look, however, suggests that the appeal is misdirected, based on false assumptions and likely to feed precisely the paranoia among Muslims that leads to violence. ‘As Muslims, we say to Christians’, the letter states, ‘that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them as long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.’ Where are Christians waging war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppressing them or driving them from their homes? It is difficult to think of any Christians in any era who have waged war against Muslims purely ‘on account of their religion’. The crusades were broadly a defensive reaction against Islamic aggression: even the Iberian Reconquista was, as its name suggests, a recovery of once Christian lands conquered by Islamic armies. The Western nations that colonised Muslim countries in Africa in the 19th century did not do so for religious motives: the French Third Republic that colonised Algeria was anticlerical and the British governments of the time were concerned with power-politics and trade. Indeed, Britain did what it could to prop up the Muslim Ottoman Empire to prevent the expansion of Christian Russia, and only after it collapsed did Britain and France occupy Syria, Palestine and Iraq — and then to secure the Suez Canal and supplies of oil, not convert the populations to faith in Christ.

The same is true of the recent invasion of Iraq. Despite the Christian beliefs of Bush and Blair, it was undertaken in the face of emphatic opposition by Pope John Paul II and other Christian leaders; and it cannot possibly be construed as a Christian attack on Islam. Quite to the contrary, the ancient Christian churches of Mesopotamia were protected by the Baath socialist regime of Saddam Hussein, and both the aim and the outcome of bringing it down was to hand power to the majority Shia Muslims. As a result there has been an exodus of Christians from Iraq, as there has been from Palestine, where the Christians are caught between Muslim and Israeli intolerance. Certainly, if the imams were appealing to Israeli Jews rather than Western Christians, then there would be some sense behind what they said in their letter published last week.

But the letter is addressed to Christian leaders and as such throws dust in the eyes of the world community because, while it is hard to find instances of the oppression of Muslims by Christians, it is all too easy to cite instances of the oppression of Christians by Muslims: they are well documented in almost every country where Muslims make up the majority of the population — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, even Turkey, where a government that hopes to join the European Union will not give legal status to Christian churches. Mosques are built in the cities of the United States and Western Europe, but no Christian church is allowed to be built in Saudi Arabia, nor Christian services held for the Christians who work in that country. Bibles and crucifixes are banned and Muslims who convert to Christianity are declared apostates and stoned to death.

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